MPs have claimed that four out of five investigations into terrorism and serious crime involve encrypted messages. Now a senior Facebook exec has said encryption is here to stay

By Margi Murphy

2nd November 2017,3:46 pm

Updated: 2nd November 2017,5:19 pm

FACEBOOK’S anti-terror chief has said that encryption “isn’t going to end” despite pleas from the government.

Apps like Telegram and WhatsApp use encryption to ensure that messages cannot be intercepted – something MPs have claimed offers terrorists and criminals a “safe space” to communicate in total privacy.

But Brian Fishman, who leads a 150-strong team tasked with finding, monitoring and removing extremists and extremist material on Facebook, said that the UK government’s request to provide a backdoor into terrorists’ conversations would always fall on deaf ears.

When quizzed on his stance on encryption while speaking this morning at Wired Live in London, he told the audience that there was no wiggle room.

Fishman said: “We think the right way to manage this is…that the governments have an interested, frankly, in working with companies that want to be responsible in what we can provide – if we can provide – some bits of information rather than pushing this [encryption] out to a million federated apps which can be really really difficult.

Facebook this week revealed that it believes 126 million people were served content from Russian propaganda around the US election

“The technology [encryption] exists. It’s not going to be put back. We need to think about how we can be responsible with it, but end-to-end encryption is not going to end.”

Fishman added that he was doing all that it could to push terrorists “back into the corners of the internet”.

WhatsApp end-to-end encryption keeps your messages secure and private

Encryption became a hot topic after it emerged that Westminster Bridge killer Khalid Masood had been using WhatsApp but that police were struggling to get access to his messages to see whether he had links to any others.

It’s unclear why they were unable to access these through his phone, which he sent a message on just minutes before he ploughed into pedestrians – killing four and injuring dozens more.

Westminster terrorist Khalid Masood used WhatsApp just minutes before he mowed into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge

The Home Secretary Amber Rudd this year said it was “completely unacceptable” that fanatics such as Masood used encrypted messages to thwart security services.

Ms Rudd told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show: “We need to make sure that organisations like Whats­App — and there are plenty of others like that — don’t provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other.

Encryption means that the messages are scrambled when they leave one phone – and can only be unscrambled using a code on the other phone.